Craig, Leader of the Lawn Gnomes
by Seaouryou
Summary: Tweek has never been so sure of something in his life. Craig wants to eat him.


You all clicked on this hoping it would be porn, didn't you? Pervs. XD

Birthday gift for the very awepsome Allison.

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Craig was a cannibal. Tweek was as sure of this as he was that the lunch ladies were using the milk cartons to poison the students. Craig was also planning to eat him. Of this he was positive. The monster had already eaten Pip, after all; no one had seen the British boy for weeks.

"Hullo, Tweek, ol' chap," Pip said, putting his tray down opposite him. Tweek promptly screamed, his bowl flipping over, showering the both of them with peas and baby carrots.

"PIP! YOU'RE A LIMEY ZOMBIE! AGAIN!"

"No?" Pip asked, giving him a somewhat befuddled look.

"But you died!"

"No, I was just visiting my sister across the pond," Pip said, picking vegetables out of his hair.

"... Oh," Tweek said, calming down. Somewhat.

So Craig hadn't messily devoured Pip to sate his unholy and barbaric hunger for human flesh. Well... that was even worse for him! That meant Craig was - oh, God - _hungry_. He'd just have to do his best to avoid him until he could find a suitable sacrifice. Like... Cartman. If Craig ate Cartman, he'd never be hungry again, and no one would have to put up with Cartman again! The perfect plan!

Unfortunately, like the rest of the world, the fates were plotting against Tweek. He'd no sooner left cafeteria than he heard a nasal voice shout, "Tweek! HEY, TWEEK!"

Tweek froze, much like a deer caught in headlights, as Craig approached him. Then he screeched, turned tail, and fled. He thought Craig might have chased after him, not that he turned back to look, but the cannibalistic boy really didn't have a prayer of catching him. No one could outrun a panicked Tweek, at least not after he cleared the hedge.

Tweek cut the rest of school because it was obviously no longer safe for him there. However, when he went home, he found the door locked. He tried to get in through a window, even the one to the attic, but found that they were all barred as well. He finally sat on his front porch and wrapped his arms around his legs, rocking back and forth in an effort to control his muscle spasms.

His parents _weren't home_. What could have happened to them? Had they abandoned him to pursue a circus life in Ohio?... no, that was ridiculously farfetched. It was obvious what had happened: his parents had _died_. Oh God, they were going to send him to live with his Uncle Joe. Uncle Joe the coffee enthusiast. Uncle Joe, the man who made his father seem like a vehement coffee-hater by comparison. Oh Jesus, Uncle Joe would make him pick coffee beans from dawn to dusk on his farm! The cows would plot against! He didn't have enough money to buy radioactive scarecrow repellent!

A car pulled up, illuminating the dark driveway and cutting off Tweek's increasingly paranoid musings. He shielded his eyes, looking quickly at either side of himself for a weapon. As the car doors opened, however, he saw that it was unnecessary. Tweek vaulted off the porch, into his mother's arms. "I'm so glad you aren't dead!"

"Well, I'm glad you aren't dead either, Tweek," his mother said with a somewhat confused laugh as she ruffled her son's messy hair. "But what are you doing home?"

"Gah! Shouldn't I be home? You didn't sell me, did you?" Tweek cried, pulling back.

"No, honey, but don't you remember? Your father and I have to go to a coffee convention today and tomorrow. You were supposed to stay with your little friend Craig."

Tweek drew back in horror. "_Craig?_"

"Now, Tweek, you need to learn to be more sociable," his father said, coming around from the other side of the car. "It's always the quiet ones that end up serial killers. You don't want to be a serial killer, do you?"

"Jesus no!" Tweek yelped, horrified. And so because he didn't want to be a serial killer, and because his parents were the ones who fed him, he couldn't argue with them. He dragged his feet to school the next day, hoping the earth would spontaneously stop spinning on its axis and the afternoon would never come.

No such luck.

"Tweek," Craig said, baring down on him the next afternoon. Tweek whimpered and backed up against the brick wall of the school. "_There_ you are. Man, I've never seen someone run so fast. You ought to be on the track team."

"Too... much... pressure..." Tweek hissed out, trying to become one with the wall.

"Anyway, man, you left before I could tell you that you're supposed to come over to my house after school. Dude, I hope you didn't sit on the porch all day."

"You can knock off the concerned act," Tweek said in a low voice. "I know you just wanted me over at your house so that you could eat me."

"_What!_" Craig exclaimed, turning a bright red color.

"I know what you _are_," Tweek hissed, pointing a finger at him.

"You..." Craig looked to his left, then to his right, then he leaned in and lowered his voice. "You _know?_"

"I've seen the way you look at people in the locker room!" he accused.

"Oh man, oh shit," Craig said, rocking back on his heels and burying his face in his hands as he groaned. "And here I thought I was being fucking inconspicuous..."

Tweek didn't say anything. He was busy trying to scale the wall backwards.

"Tweek," Craig said very seriously. "Man, you... you can't tell _anyone_. Okay?"

"No one would believe me if I did," Tweek said mournfully. No one had believed him when he warned them about the sadistic, milk-poisoning lunch ladies, after all.

Craig smiled widely at him, which unnerved Tweek immensely. "Meet me by the bike rack, okay? That's where my mom picks me up."

--

Tweek was actually a very brave person.

Not that anyone in town thought this except him. And given the fact he was deathly afraid of cows and the mind-altering powers they possessed, Tweek supposed he couldn't blame his schoolmates for thinking he was a big scaredy cat.

But _Tweek_ considered himself a very brave person, because he was constantly facing his fears. If he were really as big a scaredy cat as everyone thought, he would never leave the safety of his bedroom.

So all through his last period of the day he sharpened pencils in preparation for the inevitable final showdown between Craig the Cannibal and himself. He actually didn't know if sharpened pencils would work on cannibals, but cannibals were like vampires, and stakes killed vampires, and pencils were like stakes, right? In any case, it was better than nothing.

"Hey," Craig greeted him as he showed up at the bike rack. Tweek gave him his best battle face, and Craig tilted his head and squinted at him.

"Do you, like, have to go to the bathroom or something?"

"Jesus, no!" The school bathroom was the lunch ladies' headquarters. He never went there.

Craig's mother pulled up in her minivan. She started gushing when she saw him.

"Tweek honey! I haven't seen you in so long. Tell me, how is your mother? We simply must have your folks over for dinner some time."

"They wouldn't be interested," Tweek said firmly, then had a small seat belt crisis. On the one hand, if he buckled it then he would be at their mercy should they decide to pull off road and feast on him. On the other hand, what sort of reckless fool would drive without a seat belt? He decided they were far more likely to devour him in the privacy of their home, and buckled up.

Tweek experienced a minor break down of nerves when they pulled into Craig's driveway. He was about to step into the den of absolute evil, after all. He squeezed his eyes closed as he left the car, edging his way across the lawn and up the front steps. Tweek didn't want to see the human trophies they undoubtedly had nailed above their hearth.

Craig clapped a hand on Tweek's shoulder and he screeched and jumped, his eyes flying open to find a perfectly ordinary living room.

"Sorry, did I scare you? Why do you have your eyes closed, anyway?" Craig asked. "C'mon, let's go up to my room," he suggested, or more like demanded, as he started up the stairs. Tweek looked at his retreating back, then back around the room.

... Of course, he supposed, they wouldn't keep evidence of their inhuman tendencies where company could see it and realize what they'd wandered into. They probably kept it all in the basement, along with their big cooking pot and grass skirts.

_Or_, Tweek thought, and gulped, _they keep it upstairs_.

"Come _on!_" Craig shouted down the stairs, and Tweek whimpered, hung his head, and started up. He wished with every step that his parents had a job that made them stay home every day.

"Took you long enough," Craig said, who was perched on the edge of his bed. He swung his legs over and heaved himself off when Tweek tentatively entered the room, crossing the room and closing the door.

"AH! Why are you locking the door!" Tweek cried, jumping away and wondering if he could survive if he jumped out the bedroom window.

"Oh," Craig said, looking up. "Sorry, force of habit. I started doing it so my dad couldn't sneak in naked." He removed his hand from the doorknob. "I guess we can leave it open."

Tweek looked around the bedroom and found it lacking of cook books or voodoo kits. He had posters of the Denver Broncos, Red Racer, and wide-angle close ups of animals instead, and dirty laundry on his floor. Dirty laundry was something Tweek never left lying around, because it only attracted the Underwear Gnomes.

A scuffing drew Tweek's attention to a cage by the window. Craig left his station by the door to open the latch on the cage and remove some sort of white puffy thing.

"OH MY GOD!" Tweek shrieked, pointing a finger at him, "It's one of your legion of the undead!"

"No..." Craig said. "It's a guinea pig."

"Sure, it is _now,_" Tweek said. "But after you practice your black magic on it, it will grow to be 70-stories tall and you'll unleash it on the unsuspecting town!"

"Do you read a lot of comic books or something?" Craig asked. He sounded half curious and half amused.

"No," Tweek said, and shuddered. "They give me nightmares."

"Boys!" Craig's mother called from downstairs. "Lunch!"

"Excellent!" Craig said enthusiastically, placing his guinea pig back in the cage and thundering down the stairs. Tweek stood shellshocked. His heartbeat picked up and he began to shake, badly.

Well, like hell was he going to go downstairs! But then he happened to glance at the hamster cage, and he saw that the hamster was _staring into his soul_, and that was enough to send him scrambling from the room.

"_There_ you are, dear," Craig's mother said when he arrived, out of breath, in the doorway to the kitchen. "I've made ham sandwiches for you two."

Tweek stared at the sandwiches in horror. 'Ham.' 'Ham' his ass.

"Craig, did you wash your hands after touching Stripe?" his mother demanded, her hands on her hips.

"Of course I did!" Craig lied defensively, cramming a triangle of bread, lettuce, and human flesh into his mouth. His mother pursed her lips and gave him a distasteful look, then noticed Tweek wasn't eating.

"Tweek? Something wrong?" she asked.

"I'm - gah - a vegetarian!" he choked out, because it was the first excuse he could think of.

"Oh, I'm sorry dear! I'll make you some peanut butter and jelly," she said, opening the refrigerator. Morbid curiosity made Tweek lean forward to pear inside. He fully expected it to be stuffed with various pieces of human anatomy, and so he was rather surprised to see it contained the same things his own fridge at home contained.

"Come on, bring your sandwich in the living room with me," Craig commanded. "_Red Racer_ is on."

It is worth it to note that in third grade Craig had, thanks to Cartman's insistence, earned the title of school badass. Like most of things Cartman says, however, it is largely unfounded and has little basis in fact. Yes, Craig flipped people off, but this was only because he was worse at insulting other people than Butters - a failing that had ultimately kicked him out of the running as Cartman, Stan, and Kyle's fourth friend. The only time he'd ever been moved to violence was when someone had insulted his pet guinea pig. Otherwise, he really didn't give a damn.

Craig was in fact an incurably dork in several ways. For instance, he was compelled to watch _Red Racer_ everyday, and knew every episode by heart. When someone would mention a quote, he would break out into a long monologue, repeating an entire scene at times.

It was for these reasons that Tweek believed, should it could down to a struggle for his life, he would be able to overpower Craig at _least_ long enough to run for the authorities. He watched Craig out of the corner of his eye, not bothering to be subtle about watching him. Craig was too absorbed in the TV to notice anything that was happening around him.

If it came down to it, he knew he could distract Craig with a _Red Racer_ quote, punch him in the nuts, and run for it. But he really would rather it not come to that. Fighting with a cannibal _had_ to be hazardous - they bit, after all.

"Craig!" his mother had appeared in the doorway. "Are you watching that show _again?_"

"Yes," Craig said, his eyes not moving from the screen.

"Craig, you can't watch TV while your friend is over! You need to entertain him!"

"But _Mom_, this is one of my favorite episodes!"

"Go play outside!" she commanded.

Craig flipped his mother off, and his mother flipped him off, and then Craig growled, switched off the TV, and glared at Tweek like it was all his fault. "Let's go, then," he said irritably, heading for the front door.

Tweek glanced at Craig's mother on the way out thoughtfully. He was beginning to question her cannibalistic nature. After all, since he'd arrived, she hadn't once looked at him the way Craig looked at so many of the boys at school, and him in particular.

He decided the only way to find out if Craig's parents were cannibals as well was to ask him.

"Are your parents _like you?_" Tweek asked, keeping his voice low, should Craig's mother hear him.

"What are you, stupid? If they were, I wouldn't be here," Craig said, giving him a look that suggested he thought he was an idiot.

Tweek suppressed a shudder. Of course, he should have known. If Craig's parents were cannibals, they would have fattened him up and eaten him ages ago.

"Well," Tweek went on in the same tone, "do they _know?_"

"God no," Craig barked. He seemed to have decided that Tweek only asked stupid questions. "Man, my dad would be so mad if he knew. And Mom would be 'disappointed,' which is so fucking worse."

Tweek supposed that would be quite a disappointment, discovering your son hungered for human flesh. Craig swung the front door open and stepped out into the yard. Tweek followed after him cautiously, but he figured he was safe enough. Craig wouldn't do anything to him in the front yard - it was much too public. His eyes swept around the yard, and then he let out a shriek that was several decibels higher than the voices of the Raisins girls.

"What? What?" Craig said, twisting around to give him a concerned look. Tweek pointed in wordless terror at the gnome that was sitting on Craig's lawn. Oh Lord, they'd started coming in the _day!_ He was never safe!

Craig gave him a confused look. "The... lawn gnome? The lawn gnome made you scream like a tortured hamster on helium?"

"I'M NOT SAFE ANYWHERE!" Tweek yelped, trying to bring his sudden, mad case of shaking under control.

"Dude, it's just a porcelain lawn decoration. My mom has about a hundred of them. She collects them from garage sales and paints them. It's her hobby. Do you have, like, gnome-phobia, or something?"

He gave him a look of pure horror. It was worse than Tweek had feared. He wasn't just Craig the Cannibal... he was Craig, the Cannibalistic Leader of the Lawn Gnomes! With his army of perverted midget elves behind him, he'd devour the world!

"Hey, man," Craig said, suddenly serious, as he dug his hands into his pockets and looked up at the sky. "Um, ya'know, I want to thank you. For agreeing not to tell anyone, I mean. I'm not really ready to come out. But I guess if someone _had_ to know... I'd prefer it to be you." Craig grinned at Tweek. Tweek wasn't paying any attention to Craig, because he was still silently freaking out about the lawn gnomes and imagining horrible scenarios where they suddenly came to life all at once and strangled gardeners with hoses, chopped up the bodies with trowels, and turned them into fertilizer. So because he wasn't paying attention to Craig, he didn't really notice him leaning in, and in fact was caught completely by surprise when he pressed his lips against his.

"I knew it!" Tweek cried, jumping away and jabbing a finger at Craig's chest. Craig looked vaguely confused.

"Knew what?"

"You're a CANNIBAL! I knew you were trying to eat me!"

Craig continued to look bemused. "Tweek-"

"CANNIBAL, CANNIBAL!" Tweek shrieked, fleeing.

"That kid has _got_ to be on something more than caffeine," Craig mused, as he watched him run screaming down the street.

--

END


End file.
